The New YorkerModify

How, in this day and age, do you make it abundantly clear that you love to read? Sure, you can carry around a giant book, buy a tote that says “I Love Reading,” or carry an e-reader in a tote that says “I Love Reading on My E-reader (I’m NOT Looking at the Internet).” But the easiest way to inform people that you are literary is by hosting a reading series. You’ll want yours to have a catchy premise. Here are some we’re thinking about.

Oops! All Trauma: A totally unthemed reading series across all genres, at which fiction writers, poets, and essayists all happen to read the most depressing shit you have ever heard in your life. Sorry about your cousin!

Schadenfreude: Every piece is in German. We do not speak German.

A Hundred Thousand Words: A reading series at which all the pieces are just too good to edit down.

Nice . . . Seeing You?: Everyone in the audience of this reading series looks vaguely familiar. Is that weird-looking guy literary-famous, or did one of us sleep with him in 2014? Did that girl write a buzzy essay in The Cut, or does she just look like every other brown-haired lady we have ever seen?

Mike Drop: A reading series at which the microphone keeps malfunctioning. Some people choose to abandon it, saying, “You know what? I don’t need the mike!” Those people absolutely need the mike.

Sick Piece!: All the readers are sneezing, sniffling, congested, feverish, or hacking up a lung. There is no more intimate way to become a member of the literati than by catching your favorite writer’s whooping cough.

Snack Attack: A reading series at which the writing is probably good, but there’s really no way to know, because snacks are provided, and the snacks are carrots and stale Doritos.

Copy-Paste: Everything is plagiarized.

Caps Lock: Everything is yelled.

Can a Metaphor Be a Simile? Everything is poetry (pejorative).

Just “War and Peace”: Everyone takes turns reading “War and Peace” out loud, followed by a discussion of the book that is not really about the book. (This is also known as a book club.)

My Midlife Crisis Is New and Different: A series at which everyone reads a piece about their midlife crises, each of which makes us even more sure that our midlife crises are new and different.

Next Time, on “Couples Therapy”: Everyone writes about their least favorite couple on “Couples Therapy.”

Next Time, on “Couples Therapy” (Illegal Edition): We kidnap Orna and force her to read all her session notes and reveal where she gets her clothes.

A Reading-Series Zine: A Reading Series: This is a reading series. But it’s also a zine. The zine is mandatory. It costs a hundred and fourteen dollars. But you can carry it around in public to let everyone know that you love reading! ♦

Download a transcript.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen

Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter.

This week, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz kick off the summer months with a new installment of the Critics at Large advice series. Listeners’ questions run the gamut: a high-school economics teacher seeks films for his students which aren’t set in the world of finance; a caller from Iran looks for cultural works to help endure periods of extreme uncertainty; and two friends on the cusp of college graduation ask for recommendations to guide them in their next chapter. “Art is not a thing separate from our troubles or from our awareness of the insane contingencies of life,” Cunningham says. “It’s meant as a companion and a response to those. I think that’s shining through in some of these questions.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Sorry to Bother You” (2018)
“My Architect: A Son’s Journey” (2003)
“Les dites cariatides” (1984)
“Twenty Minutes in Manhattan,” by Michael Sorkin
The photography of Eugène Atget
The music of the Notorious B.I.G., Heavy D, Fat Joe, and Big Pun
“Sentimental Education,” by Gustave Flaubert
Václav Havel’s “Audience”
“The Best of Everything,” by Rona Jaffe
“How to Murder Your Life,” by Cat Marnell
“Becoming a Centenarian,” by Calvin Tomkins (The New Yorker)
“This Old Man,” by Roger Angell (The New Yorker)
“Tabula Rasa,” by John McPhee (The New Yorker)
“Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979)
“Divorcing,” by Susan Taubes
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels
“Ghost World,” by Daniel Clowes
“Frances Ha” (2012)
“Asparagus” (1979)
Roger Payne’s “Songs of the Humpback Whale”
“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction,” by J. D. Salinger
The poetry of Sylvia Plath, particularly “Tulips”
Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America”
“I Will,” by the Beatles
“St. Judy’s Comet,” by Paul Simon
“Sail Away Ladies,” by Odetta

New episodes drop every Thursday. Follow Critics at Large wherever you get your podcasts.

In the opening moments of Morgan Bassichis’s bright, mournful “Can I Be Frank?,” they stand center stage at the tiny Soho Playhouse, clutching a mike and shrieking a denunciation of a closeted celebrity: “Liberace, Liberace, can you hear me, Liberace? You died. You lied. You died of AIDS and you lied. . . . You could have helped so many people—sorry, Gloria, can we get the lights?” Bassichis twitches as if emerging from hypnosis, then apologizes: it’s not really them yelling, they explain, it’s a bit by Frank Maya, an artist who died of AIDS-related complications in 1995. And Maya’s uncut rage may be too hot a way to open this one-person show—so can they start over? And add some context?

The context: Bassichis, a nonbinary performance artist, became obsessed with Maya after meeting his brother at an artists’ residency and thrilling to the parallels between their work. Maya, like Bassichis, did an act that was a bit standup, a bit performance art, broken up by dreamy, oddball songs. Maya, too, was a confessionalist and a pop-culture obsessive—he was known for his “rants,” manifestos that involved “tearing to shreds” other gay artists, a tradition that Bassichis describes, puckishly, as “one of our ancestral healing practices.” And Maya, like Bassichis, craved fame, the mainstream sort that he was tiptoeing toward when he died at forty-five, just as drugs for AIDS were becoming available. As a result, he became a cultural footnote, having exited the scene two years before Ellen DeGeneres’s “Yep, I’m Gay” Time cover hit newsstands, two decades before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage—and long before the hideous backlash of recent years, as school boards and state legislators worked to snuff out the queer history that Bassichis’s show celebrates.

The performance is intended as a sort of séance, an attempt to summon the spirit of Maya—and, through him, the queer demimonde lost to the plague. But Bassichis’s arch joke is that what we’re watching is only a rough draft, a “preview” in which one thirsty artist struggles to celebrate another, only to get derailed by their own solipsism. There’s no pretense that Bassichis is truly embodying Maya: the real Maya, whose work is on YouTube, was, as Bassichis acknowledges, more butch and more chill, with a regular-dude affect. (His energy reminded me a bit of Tony Danza’s, and was surprisingly similar to that of another gay pioneer, this one fictional: Jodie Dallas, Billy Crystal’s character on the late-seventies TV show “Soap.”)

Bassichis has their own bracing charisma: an elegant schnoz, sparkling eyes, and a slinky body that wriggles like a Squirmles toy as they glide over the stage, tugged to and fro by audience banter. That craving for attention is the aspect of Maya’s work that Bassichis focusses most closely on, as they tangle themself in the mike cord like Liza Minnelli on quaaludes, then cue up audience members to read sycophantic questions off notecards. There aren’t a lot of details here about Maya’s life: it’s a very different project from, say, Matt Wolf’s brilliant documentary “Pee-wee as Himself,” which gently but insistently cuts to the core of Paul Reubens’s mystique. Instead, it’s more of a vaudeville act with YouTube links, or a campy riff on “Pale Fire,” a clinging vine of commentary wrapped around Maya’s act, concealing as much as it exposes.

At times, this approach can wear thin, the air quotes so enormous that they dwarf what’s inside them. But, when the method clicks, it captures something profound: the deep craving to understand, cross-generationally, queer art that refused to play it small. At one juncture, Bassichis recounts a routine that Maya did about coming out as gay to his father, a devout Catholic who reassured him that their family would pay any price for a cure. Maya wisecracked that everybody already knew the cure for homosexuality—fame. Then Bassichis explains the gulf between then and now: when they first heard the joke, they thought the point was that gay men were showboaters, striving class-president types, whose traumas got healed by the limelight. But Maya’s real joke was that getting famous meant you could no longer be gay—you needed to retreat to the closet, like Liberace and Reubens did.

At times, the show reminded me of David Drake’s “The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me,” from 1992, in which Drake argues that the then popular Chelsea “clone” aesthetic wasn’t about vanity so much as self-defense: get bashed enough and you, too, might adopt a shield of muscle. Bassichis argues for something similar: that gay-male narcissism can be a form of political defiance, a refusal to be ignored. Watching him, I was flooded with memories of that lost era, back when debates erupted in response to OutWeek magazine, which took shots at all the famous figures who chose security over solidarity. Mostly, I flashed back to Buddy Cole, a character created by Scott Thompson on the Canadian sketch show “The Kids in the Hall,” which débuted in 1988. It was my first glimpse of the razzle-dazzle of gay fury: Cole, a haughty queen who held court from his barstool, similarly took aim at his peers, tearing into homophobic comics such as Sam Kinison and Andrew Dice Clay, during a time when grabbing the mike back from bigots was a radical act. “Can I Be Frank?” performs the opposite of a takedown—it throws its arms around the painful past, as if it were an old friend you might never see again, someone who might have a few sharp ideas about how to survive the present.

Just uptown from the Soho Playhouse, you can find a more cheerful variant of queer fandom in “Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorized Musical,” an adaptation of last year’s surprise television hit about closeted gay hockey players, one sweetly Canadian, one gloomily Russian. You might assume, not unreasonably, that this parody would be dumb, disposable fun—for superfans only. You’d be wrong! To my shock and delight, “Heated Rivalry,” written with unsettling swiftness by Dylan MarcAurele, is a flat-out terrific musical, no caveats necessary. I saw it with somebody who hadn’t watched the show, and she loved it, too.

Like “Can I Be Frank?,” “Heated Rivalry” arrives in ironic air quotes: a trio of horny housewives, all named Susan, sing a rollicking homage to their preferred binge-watch, a series about “Hockey players, with big butts / Sucking dick, but they’re sad.” The prima donna of the group (the fabulous Ryann Redmond, in a haystack wig) explains that this is all a sacred ritual, an attempt, during the show’s hiatus, “to keep the spirit of Shane and Ilya”—the show’s central couple—“alive through this endless winter.” Yet what Susan narrates, as she guzzles “Ambien margaritas,” is not a rude satire; in fact, it’s actually a pretty solid distillation of the show’s narrative. For all the raunchy puns about “heavy loads” and meta-references to the fandom (the YouTube videos of Connor Storrie, the original Ilya, come into play), the show delivers much of the same emotional kick of the series, from its enemies-to-lovers frisson to the psychic burden of the celebrity closet. That makes sense, really: Aren’t Broadway musicals and romance novels the art forms best designed to tap buried feelings that can’t be repressed?

All the songs are good, from Ilya’s hilariously mournful introductory number, “Big Ass, Cold Heart,” to the peculiarly affecting ballad “This Fuck Is Different,” a romantic-breakthrough number delivered with such resolute, distressed sincerity by Jimin Moon, who plays the Canadian goofball Shane Hollander, that a man near me clutched his chest. Key sequences from the show—like a cruising scene in a hotel gym—are reproduced, efficiently, using basic props. The sex is staged vertically, up against mattresses, or using “Avenue Q”-esque puppets; the Susan trio juggle multiple roles, from Ilya’s cruel dad to Shane’s hovering mom—and, each night, one lucky audience member is invited onstage to play the hunky zaddy Scott Hunter.

Best of all are the adorable Moon and Jay Armstrong Johnson, as Ilya, who do much more than mug as the star-crossed lovers. It’s impossible to say how Frank Maya might greet a crossover phenomenon like this: As schlock? As progress? But, in the midst of a Broadway season overflowing with high camp, from “Titaníque” to “The Jellicle Ball,” there’s some room to spare for a humble, handmade valentine, découpaged with X’s and O’s. ♦

A truism: men lie about how tall they are. Height exaggeration is one of the oldest and most well-documented forms of self-inflation. Joseph Stalin reportedly wore lifts and had photos of himself doctored so that he would look larger; historians have posited that he was between five feet two and five feet four, which is perhaps why Harry S. Truman (a respectable five feet nine) is said to have referred to him as a “little squirt.” And it’s not just dictators. Overstating—and straight-up manipulating—height has long been common in Hollywood: Alan Ladd, the nineteen-forties leading man (an estimated five feet six or five feet seven), once acted alongside a taller starlet, who stood in trenches that had been dug into set floors. Tom Cruise (five feet seven) has been known to stand on a wooden box.

In recent years, the rise of dating apps—some of which allow users to set height preferences when browsing potential matches—has made height exaggeration even more ubiquitous. “I have gone on dates with multiple men that have all starkly lied about their height. STARKLY,” one woman shared on Reddit. “This has happened multiple times and I’m just so confused.” Some men argue that these lies are necessary to land a date at all: it’s common for women to specify on their profiles that they’re only interested in men taller than them, leaving shorter guys stuck between, on the one hand, being truthful and ignored, and, on the other, lying and getting more matches. Studies suggest that men are frequently opting for the latter. In 2008, a group of researchers found that more than eighty per cent of surveyed participants physically misrepresented themselves on dating profiles, with men distorting their height significantly more than women did. Perhaps doing so arose from a history of in-person rejection: social scientists have found, in both observational and experimental studies, that women overwhelmingly prefer taller men—one assessment of speed-dating trends identified that shorter men ended up with fewer matches than their taller peers. Behind the digital fortress of the apps, men have taken to upselling themselves to increase their odds of an in-person date, a development that prospective matches are none too thrilled with. Some women have even begun using A.I. tools to assess a man’s photos in hopes of using his proportions and surroundings to estimate his true height.

Still, isn’t the jig up as soon as a conversation moves from an app to an in-person meeting? Perhaps not. “The thought process is that you can get by her stupid height filter and she won’t really know the difference anyway,” one Reddit user wrote, to justify adding a few inches to his profile’s listed height. Other men have adopted a more defensive posture, claiming to overstate their height only because everyone else is doing it. “I’m 5'10" but I’ve heard women take off 2" on dating apps,” one poster lamented. “So I should probably put my height at 6' to get past the 6' height filter.”

Does height actually matter? It’s a pervasive pop-philosophical question in which many contemporary ideologies clash and converge. Social-media platforms are filled with short-form videos that clumsily grapple with stigmas surrounding height supremacy. Man-on-the-street interviews often feature drunken arguments between men and women about whether height is essential to sexual attraction. “If he’s not six-four and buff, he’s not it,” a young woman declares in one video, prompting her interlocutor, a twentysomething dude with frosted tips, to threaten to remove her makeup with a wipe—I guess to make the point that women can more easily manipulate their appearance, whereas short guys are stuck as they are. Then there’s the viral video of a freshly showered blond woman satirically intoning that she’s “looking for a man in finance. Trust fund. Six-five. Blue eyes.” The clip has been viewed more than fifty million times and clearly struck a chord in the Zeitgeist; its creator, Megan Boni, has since said that she sought to criticize “impossible” dating standards, while acknowledging that she maintains some of those standards herself. Is wanting to mate with a six-five sexual partner “living in alignment” with your authentic values and desires, or a discriminatory practice that punishes a person based on an irrevocable biological characteristic? On the internet, where cliché-derived moral frameworks and undercooked psychologizing constitute much of the sociocultural discourse, the positive correlation between height and status either is flattened into the shallowness of one’s “personal preferences” or enters the realm of ethical outrage.

Height discrimination, of course, is not a new phenomenon. Researchers in cognitive science have long theorized that conceptual thinking is informed by how the human body looks and moves. Figurative language for power and success tends to evoke verticality and size: to go above and beyond, to be bigger and better, to reach for new heights. Conversely, the language of diminutiveness—to be down bad, to feel small, to live below your means—suggests submission, subordination, weakness. In his 1945 book, “Phenomenology of Perception,” the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the relationship between the living body and the ways we perceive reality, establishing a metaphysical “significance to the directions up and down in the physical world.” Drawing on the image of the mountain as “high and upright,” Merleau-Ponty offers that “there are for me certain shapes which are particularly favoured, as they are for other men, and which are capable of giving rise to a psychological science.” Uprightness, in other words, is associated with agency, potentiality, and capacity, creating a “body schema” that understands its value through physical orientation and movement. For other theorists, the correlation between height and power has a simpler, evolutionary explanation: the bigger the animal, the more likely it is not only to survive but to dominate its natural environment. And why would humans be any different? Taller people, after all, reportedly make more money and earn promotions at a higher rate than their shorter colleagues. They claim to be happier and more fulfilled, and have greater educational success. One study found that kindergarten teachers perceived their shorter male students as being less academically capable than their classmates. Another study observed children as young as ten months old correlating larger physical statures with dominance.

The online subculture known as looksmaxxing claims to offer a set of newfangled solutions for men—many of them short, many of them incels—to increase their sexual and social status. On message boards and forums, TikToks and live streams, looksmaxxers trade strategies for sharpening their jawlines, adding muscle, and “ascending” into a higher order of man. The methodology for achieving such goals spans from the mundane (lift weights; eat healthy; take showers) to the deranged (smoke methamphetamine; smash your face with a hammer; inject high doses of anabolic steroids).

For men under six feet, looksmaxxing influencers suggest several solutions for increasing their “sexual market value”: stand on your tiptoes (“tiptoemaxxing”); wear platform shoes; perform spinal stretches; or, to truly ascend, undergo a limb-lengthening procedure that can add up to six inches of height. And men are indeed lengthening their limbs, flying to international clinics, having metal rods inserted into their bones, and then, after a brutal recovery process, relearning how to walk. In what serves as a sort of penultimate climax in the 2025 film “Materialists,” a stunningly rich and handsome bachelor, played by Pedro Pascal, reveals that he and his brother have both undergone surgeries to become taller. “Women just approach us and talk to us now, which never happened before,” he admits. “But you can also tell the difference at work, at restaurants, at airports. You’re just worth more.” The film makes the resonant if not heavy-handed point that the world, and women, favors taller people, that masculine value is enmeshed with height—an argument that the face of the looksmaxxing movement, Clavicular, extends to other self-mutilation practices that aim to make men more beautiful. Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever: these procedures allow a man to defy the biological hierarchy and remake himself into a towering, vascular Adonis.

Merleau-Ponty believed that “the shape of our body” carries with it an “ever-present principle of absent-mindedness and bewilderment,” a spatial and phenomenological experience we can never fully gain access to. Looksmaxxers and limb-lengtheners may disagree. With enough optimization and intervention, their argument goes, the body can be manipulated into becoming fully knowable, mastered, perfect. And, once they become perfect, they’ll never need to tell a lie again.

Some men are just born with it. The San Antonio Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, for instance, has become the most dominant player in the N.B.A. because of his totally anomalous combination of skill, agility, and, yes, height. There’s really never been a player, or a human being, like him before. By the time he was fifteen, he was more than seven feet tall. Three years ago, when he became eligible for the N.B.A. draft, he was regarded by some as the greatest pro-basketball prospect ever. Now, at twenty-two years old, Wembanyama is competing in his first N.B.A. Finals and is already the single best defender in the history of the sport. Listed at seven feet four, he can dunk without jumping, palm a ball with two fingers, and block shots with the ease of a parent playing against a toddler. And then, with the alacrity of a much smaller player, he can break down defenders off the dribble and take pullup threes from the half-court logo. He also appears to still be growing. On TikTok, fans have taken to conducting forensic investigations of photographs of him, attempting to calculate his height against any object in the frame—proof that even the tallest men in the world are not immune from the kind of scrutiny and careful height analysis that women so often engage in when judging a man on a dating app.

Another phenomenon from which basketball players are not immune: lying about their height. Across almost every level of competitive basketball, embellishing one’s height is so common as to be unremarkable. High-school and college players often add a few inches to their listed heights to attract scouts, or to appear more formidable to an opponent. So do N.B.A. players; for much of the league’s history, height reporting relied on hearsay. The Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, who played power forward, was listed at six feet six throughout his career, though he later admitted to being around six feet four—roughly the same height as the shooting guard Michael Jordan. Hakeem Olajuwon was regularly listed as a seven-footer, though it’s understood that he was probably closer to six feet ten. The examples are numerous, the lies incessant: J. J. Barea and Allen Iverson were likely under six feet tall despite being listed as such; big men like Draymond Green and Kevin Love have, in the past, added two to three inches. Paradoxically, some N.B.A. players preferred being seen as shorter than they actually were. Kevin Garnett is allegedly seven feet tall—or seven feet one, depending on whom you ask—but said he was six feet eleven to avoid being pegged as a center. So too for Kevin Durant, who, despite being a verified six feet eleven, marketed himself as six feet nine to maintain positional flexibility, and to avoid the reputation of being a power forward rather than a small forward. (In 2016, Durant told the Wall Street Journal, “When I’m talking to women, I’m 7 feet. In basketball circles, I’m 6-9.”)

In recent years, the N.B.A. has mandated more precise height reporting. “The integrity of that information is critical,” Mark Tatum, the N.B.A.’s deputy commissioner, told Bloomberg, in 2019. He cited legalized sports betting as one impetus for the newfound transparency, and public trust as another. Whereas teams used to be able to “self-report” their players’ heights, or recycle measurements from a player’s college or amateur career, the league now requires front offices to certify a player’s shoeless height via a team physician.

For new players entering—or hoping to enter—the league, the first official measurement takes place at the N.B.A. draft combine. I attended this year’s event, a multiday showcase at Wintrust Arena, in Chicago. The combine abounds with detailed spreadsheets and advanced statistics, athletic testing and anthropometric details, timed drills and agility assessments—data that informs the strange and inexact evaluation process that is professional-sports scouting. While prospects complete jump-shot circuits and execute standing vertical leaps on the hardwood floor of the arena, a jumbotron above them displays a carrousel of percentages and decimals, a seemingly endless scroll documenting the quality of their performance. The numbers aim to tell a story, create an arc, aggregate a narrative out of what otherwise, to the naked eye, might simply seem like a group of exceptionally athletic young men participating in an assortment of frivolous physical challenges. With the proper framing, though, the drills take on an urgent, almost dramatic tenor. The N.B.A. draft is just weeks away, and the uncertain professional and financial futures of the seventy or so prospects invited to the combine hangs like humidity in the air. For some guys, the only question is where they’ll be drafted to; for others, there is also the question of whether they’ll be drafted at all. The stakes are equally high for teams—draft-night decisions can dictate the directions of franchises and determine the fates of front offices. Every iota of data about a prospect, then, becomes pregnant with meaning.

Size, of course, is the most consequential physical attribute of a player in the N.B.A. (If there is one place where height truly matters, for reasons beyond the superficial, it is here.) No matter how cerebral or skilled a prospect is, if he is shorter than average for his position, then his chances of thriving in the league are low. Take Braden Smith or Tyler Tanner, for instance, two talented guards whose combine measurements raised alarms. Smith, the N.C.A.A.’s all-time assist leader, had previously been listed between six feet and six feet one, but his official combine height, without shoes, came in at a hair over five feet ten; Tanner, a guard out of Vanderbilt, also shrank from six feet to under five feet eleven. (These inches are not trivial—there is only one current N.B.A. player listed under five feet eleven: the five-foot-seven Yuki Kawamura, a free agent who may not be on a roster next season.) Sub-six-footers aren’t the only ones who exaggerate their height, though. The Alabama forward Amari Allen, who had been a projected mid- to late first-round pick, had perhaps the most incriminating discrepancy: in college, he was recorded at six feet eight, but at the combine he’s clocked at six feet five and a quarter. (It’s since been reported that Allen will return to school for his sophomore season.) There’s no escaping the truth at the combine—the league measures these guys down to the quarter inch, and publishes the findings online for everyone to see.

Height can be surprisingly difficult to discern when watching a basketball game. Depending on a player’s frame, limb length, musculature, and verticality, he may feel bigger on the court than he actually is. A guy could measure barefoot at five feet nine but play, in shoes, like he’s six feet one. Eric Leidersdorf, the president of P3, a sports-science and athlete-development company that works with some of the N.B.A.’s biggest stars using biomechanics, motion capture, and data analytics, says that a person’s perceived height can depend on their “movement quality,” especially their “lateral movement and change of direction.” For teams interested in drafting a small guard, like Smith or Tanner, this sort of advanced testing may be used to determine whether he can plausibly withstand the physical demands of the N.B.A. Small guards are not the only demographic that demands increased data collection; life in the N.B.A. is evolving even for the freakishly tall. A seven-foot big man is no longer a high-value commodity exclusively because of his size. According to Liedersdorf, questions about “big-man prospects consistently surround lateral movement now,” not just standing reach or wingspan. The modern N.B.A. has little room for the old-fashioned center: slow-moving, ham-fisted, unable to leave the paint or sprint back on defense. Height remains an essential factor when evaluating the archetypal big man, but, as was the case with the undersized guard, it is far from the only metric that teams rely on when assessing a prospect’s potential.

Along those lines, J. Kyle Mann, a basketball analyst and draft expert for The Ringer, argued that there’s less incentive, these days, for players and teams to fabricate height, owing to the positionless nature of the contemporary N.B.A. game. A seven-footer is not, by default, plucked under the basket anymore; he may stretch the floor to the three-point line, or be an integral part of a perimeter-switching defense. When it comes to assessing height and other physical attributes, Mann says it’s “nice that there’s transparency,” but it doesn’t “totally dissuade anyone” from more holistically appraising a prospect’s skill set and taking a chance on a guy if his play style, cerebration, and temperament align with a team’s “organizational cohesiveness.”

Besides, as Mann notes, for all the positive advancements in data analytics and biomechanic measurements, there remains a lot of “pseudoscience-y psychobabble stuff in this realm”—enough data to drive any reasonable person insane. At the combine, as executives and scouts furrowed their brows and furtively took notes, Mann and I stood on the concourse, watching team personnel watch prospects work out. “It’s not an exact science,” he says. “There’s still a lot of human judgment.”

By the time the combine’s midweek scrimmages take place, there seems to be no more data to collect. As riveting as the release of the anthropometric measurements was, they mostly reaffirmed whatever strengths or limitations a player was already perceived to have. Braden Smith certainly measured shorter than expected, but size has never been his calling card. He’s a floor general who can control the pace and tempo of a game, and renowned for those skills which are hard to teach: court vision, competitiveness, decision-making. As the smallest guy on the floor, he’s learned to use his stature to his advantage, curving and slicing between lengthy defenders and finding tight windows to score or set up a teammate for an open shot. During the scrimmages, as he fights over screens and boxes out guys a foot bigger than him, it’s easy to sense in him a silent fortitude, a dogged and determined spirit—qualities that’ll make life in the N.B.A. possible. Maybe it never mattered if he was five feet ten or six feet one. At a certain point, he’ll have to prove that he belongs in a space where numbers and myths and analytics and white lies no longer matter, where breath and body and movement intersect in the absent-minded and bewildered way Merleau-Ponty spoke of, a space we have no conscious control or command over, anyway.

Which is not to say that N.B.A. players don’t also seek physical transformation. They may not be lengthening their limbs, but they are working with people like Leidersdorf to maximize their full athletic potential. After the combine ended, I spoke with him at the P3 offices, in Santa Barbara, where he walked me through the dizzying amount of data and details they use to advise on athlete-specific developmental programs. He mentioned his work with the Oklahoma City Thunder shooting guard Ajay Mitchell, who “was not a good athlete by N.B.A. standards” when he first arrived, as a college student, at P3’s biomechanical laboratory. But, after years of movement and strength training, Mitchell morphed into a player who was “physically ready” for life in the league. A second-round pick coming out of college, he has since bloomed into one of the N.B.A. playoffs’ breakout stars, averaging more than fifteen points per game for the defending champion Thunder, who were eliminated in the Western Conference finals, last week, by Wembanyama and the Spurs. Mitchell’s story is one of those precipitous, magical rises that make sports so enthralling to follow: a no-name guard from a mid-major school who works tirelessly to defy his physical limitations until he becomes a star. It’s a narrative that may give you hope—until you realize that Mitchell is six feet four. ♦

When the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its doors, in the spring of 1965, L.A. was a young city in the midst of transforming itself into a cultural capital, with the buildings and institutions to prove it. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had just opened; the Mark Taper Forum and the Ahmanson Theatre would soon follow. With the Watts riots still several months in the future, the city, as far as anyone knew, was ascendant.

To create a dedicated space for art—which had previously been tucked in with the dinosaur bones at the Natural History Museum—the county allocated a ten-acre site, next to the La Brea Tar Pits, along Wilshire Boulevard, at a midway point between downtown and the beach. LACMA was to be Los Angeles’s own Metropolitan Museum of Art, an encyclopedic institution to house world-historical objects cajoled from omnivorous collectors like William Randolph Hearst. William Pereira, the local architect selected (over Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) to design the campus, delivered three structures sheathed in chipped white marble, set around a fountain in which Alexander Calder’s tripartite mobile “Hello Girls” frolicked, when the spouts were working, which they usually weren’t.

What a disappointment! “It is—or could have been—an important building, the largest art museum built in the U.S. in 25 years and located in a city second only to New York in importance and second to none in growth and vitality,” the editors of Arts & Architecture wrote. They proceeded to eviscerate the design: the galleries were cramped, the lights cast doubling shadows, and the narrow columns made it look like an office building, of the kind admired by Howard Ahmanson, the project’s lead patron. Other critics agreed: LACMA was superficially trite and substantially dysfunctional. “The total impact is singularly oppressive,” the art critic for the Saturday Review lamented.

Sixty-one years later, how quaint that complaint seems: one poorly conceived arts complex in a city that seemed bound for glory. The L.A. of 2026 is a more mature and more troubled metropolis, certain of its importance but uncertain of its long-term stability. After eighteen months of crisis that saw historic urban fires, harassment by federal immigration authorities, and the generalized anxiety that attends a place where rents are high and services low, public transit inadequate and gas prices insane, the city’s vitality is flagging. Growth is negative, and those still here are deeply unsatisfied, more so than at any time in the decade-plus since U.C.L.A. started collecting data on the subject.

It is for this Los Angeles that the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor has designed a building that is both futuristic and primordial. A great gray swish spanning Wilshire Boulevard, the new LACMA opened to the public in May. It calls to mind a spaceship loaded with several thousand artifacts representative of life on Earth, ready to leave this torn-up planet for a new frontier. It’s a winning building, ambitious, frank, and generous, with soulful poured-in-place raw-concrete walls, and acres of natural light illuminating the art, often without the intervention of vitrines or heavy-handed wall texts. There is ample space for contemplation and surprise.

Zumthor, who is eighty-three and lives in a remote Alpine village, was an esoteric—and controversial—choice of architect for a large-scale public project. (I wrote about Zumthor, and the debate surrounding the building, in 2020.) His work is highly personal and idiosyncratic, and includes a thermal spa, a field chapel dedicated to a Swiss mystic, and a monument to suspected witches burned at the stake in seventeenth-century Norway. He designs from the inside out. “It starts with the intention to create emotional space,” he has said. “I don’t set out to do a beautiful object that you look at from the outside. . . . I’m looking for architecture space, and architecture space, as we know, is a void. . . . I want to design something that doesn’t exist.”

The exterior of LACMA.Photograph by Iwan Baan / courtesy LACMA

The need to redevelop the LACMA campus was undisputed: even one of the project’s architects endorsed the idea of demolition, not long after construction was complete. In 2001, an international competition was held, resulting in a Rem Koolhaas design; by 2003, the plan, which failed to attract meaningful support from donors, had been abandoned. Then, in 2006, Michael Govan was hired as director and chief executive officer of LACMA. This time, there would be no competition or public process. Govan hand-selected Zumthor, and then set about persuading the county, which dedicated a hundred and twenty-five million dollars in taxpayer money, and the donor class, which provided the rest, to trust his pick.

Zumthor had never worked in the United States. At LACMA, he was tasked with making a public building in an American megacity, a place of thrilling cultural collision, seismic instability, severe inequality, schemes and dreams and never enough money. Elaine Wynn, the late hotelier, casino owner, philanthropist, and co-chair of the LACMA board, pledged fifty million dollars. When I interviewed her, in 2020, she conceded that supporting Zumthor was a risk. “He had not done anything monumental,” she said. “Everything he had done was so precious. But each was so authentic. . . . it was theatrical without being false or pretentious.”

Eventually, Wynn’s donation was eclipsed by a hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar gift from the entertainment executive David Geffen, who secured the naming rights to the whole building, which is, officially, the David Geffen Galleries. Wynn, who died last spring and for whom a wing of Zumthor’s aerodynamic structure is named, donated a Francis Bacon triptych depicting Bacon’s friend and fellow-painter Lucian Freud, the only Bacons on display in a public Los Angeles museum. It’s here, with your back to the Bacons, that you can sit on a gracious leather bench and watch the cars rush by on Wilshire, the crowns of the palms just below eye level, from the vertiginous flying-dream vantage of a bird alighting.

The new LACMA is organized by bodies of water—the art of the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, and Atlantic regions each occupies a zone. Rather than a catalogue of human achievement, arranged Eurocentrically and hierarchically, the layout suggests affinities, connections, and unexpected cross-pollinations: John Singer Sargent’s “Rose-Marie Ormond Reading in a Cashmere Shawl” and a nineteenth-century European paisley dress alongside a rare Kashmiri map shawl; Greg Noll’s longboard with Issey Miyake’s molded-plastic bustier. When I visited the new building with Govan, he joked that Los Angeles’s encyclopedic museum still had all the hallmarks of its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts. “Split-Rocker,” a towering animal-head totem by Jeff Koons adorned with thousands of native plants, served as the lion at the gate. Michael Heizer’s sculpture “Levitated Mass,” a three-hundred-and-forty-ton boulder suspended over a concrete slot, was a negative-space version of an obelisk, and Chris Burden’s “Urban Light,” an array of columns made from disused L.A. streetlamps, was the requisite Greco-Roman temple.

Creating a fluid, omnidirectional space was central to what Govan had hoped to achieve. “I wanted everything on one floor,” he said. “No front, no back, up, or down. You have many ways to pass through the building, and so you pick your own. There’s no one way through art history.” Art is hung and displayed all along the building’s perimeter, facing windows open to the cityscape, and in numerous small interior galleries. “It’s like a little European village, just like Peter’s village, with terraces, streets, and plazas,” Govan said. “And you just find what you want.” The guidebook sold in the museum store is called “Wander.” Conversations overheard in the Geffen Galleries mostly revolve around attempts to meet up when one in a party has gone astray. “Where are you?” I heard several people say into their phones, before struggling to describe their location. By the big Egyptian sphynx that is not actually Egyptian, but was commissioned from the contemporary L.A. sculptor Lauren Halsey, close to the Athena. . . . Oh, never mind, I’ll just meet you at the Erewhon. (A micro-Erewhon café has opened on LACMA’s ground level, facing the reinstalled and refurbished Calder.)

The impulse to prioritize individual experience, inviting visitors to get lost the way one might in a garden, makes a powerful argument that is not just about art history but also about Los Angeles as a city of artists in potential. “Half of every perception is what you bring to it,” Govan said. “You have to make space for that. For me, the ideal museum is something that gives you ideas to do something creative. It’s not just about taking in what people have done but about what’s possible.”

The new building, made from old materials using ultra-modern technology, has a quality that makes it singular in Los Angeles. Solid as a rock, it feels as if it’s been here all along, and as if it will be here well past when the rest of the place is gone. It’s easy to envision: Heizer’s boulder and slot, the spontaneously blooming rocker, and a streetlamp or two, a monument to culture in the midst of a future wasteland. ♦

There was a meme going around among Peruvians a few months ago: a picture of the underside of a bottle cap, the kind that announces you’ve won a prize. “Congratulations,” the cap reads. “You’re the new President of Peru.”

There’s a sting of truth to this, of course. The turnover among Peruvian Presidents is such that, when one is forced out of office, it doesn’t even rate a mention on the various group chats I have with my family back in Peru; some heads of state have had such short tenures they had barely enough time to seat a Cabinet before they were shown the door. Whoever is sworn in this July will be the ninth President in a decade, and only the third to actually win an election. The other six ascended to the highest office in the land as a result of the dysfunction that has made Peru a punch line in political-science circles, a sad story of ungovernability played on a loop. In the past ten years, four Presidents have been impeached by Congress, and two have resigned. There have been three heads of state since October of last year, each uniquely unqualified to lead a nation.

Take, as an example, José Jerí, a thirty-nine-year-old legislator who spent the hours after his swearing-in frantically unfollowing pornographic Instagram accounts and deleting old tweets that were as pathetic as they were misogynistic (sample: “Good women are seduced by love, affection and respect. For all the others, there’s Mastercard”). He was deposed just a hundred and thirty-one days later, amid corruption allegations, and replaced by a caretaker President, the eighty-three-year-old leftist José María Balcázar, whose most deeply held political principle appears to be his unwavering support for child marriage. Four ex-Presidents are currently imprisoned. The former President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of crimes against humanity, corruption, and abuse of power, and locked up for fifteen years, before being released on humanitarian grounds in 2023, less than a year before his death. Another former President, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who spent nearly three years under house arrest, is banned from leaving the country until the end of 2026, and still faces the possibility of an eight-and-a-half-year prison term for alleged corruption. It’s no wonder that more than ninety per cent of Peruvians distrust their own government.

You might think that no one would aspire to a position with so little job security and such a high likelihood of incarceration, but, in fact, April’s first-round vote featured a record thirty-six candidates, their names and party affiliations crammed onto a ballot the size of a broadsheet. There were so many would-be Presidents that debates had to be staged over three consecutive nights. Among the candidates were a former professional soccer player, a comedian, the brother of a deposed ex-President convicted of bribery, a retired general, and a singer-songwriter. A poll published a few days before the election revealed that eighty per cent of voters didn’t understand the mechanics of, or legal requirements for, voting, and with a ballot so large—sixteen and a half by seventeen inches, the candidates split into five columns—it wasn’t surprising. To further complicate matters, one candidate died in a car accident after the ballots were printed, while another, Vladimir Cerrón, a neurosurgeon and a self-proclaimed Marxist, ran for President while a fugitive from the law, accused of corruption. It was as if Cerrón had decided to skip the intermediate step of actually being President and proceed directly to the dreary endgame that Peruvians have come to expect from their disgraced heads of state.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of all this baroque dysfunction is how little it seems to have affected the economic life of the nation. Despite the tragicomic instability and the rotating cast of nobodies temporarily tasked with running the country, when seen in macroeconomic terms, Peru appears to be doing just fine, thank you. The national economy is heavily reliant on the price of gold and copper, both of which are close to historical peaks. Gold exports brought in more than twenty billion dollars last year, and copper nearly twenty-five billion. Mining investments grew by almost a quarter when compared with 2024. That’s a lot of legal money pouring into the Peruvian economy (to say nothing of illegal gains from unlicensed mining and drug trafficking, which, together, are estimated at five to seven per cent of the national G.D.P.). All of this means that Peru, unlike other countries in the region, can afford to pay its debts while borrowing money at relatively low interest rates. In mid-April, just after the first round of the election, Peru’s Central Bank announced that it had more than a hundred million dollars in foreign currency in its coffers, a record sum, equivalent to nearly thirty per cent of the country’s G.D.P. Last year, the economy grew at a rate of 3.4 per cent, one of the highest in the region, better than that of Brazil, Colombia, or Mexico. Inflation remains among the lowest in Latin America, debt is under control, interest payments are manageable, and the national credit is good, making for the kinds of indicators that Peru’s neighbors can only dream of. It’s as if the economy had simply decoupled from the malfunctioning political system.

When I put this apparent contradiction to the Peruvian economist Carolina Trivelli, she was less than convinced, and she was not particularly enthused by the country’s medium- and long-term economic outlook. “The snapshot is pretty,” Trivelli conceded. “And compared to our neighbors, we look amazing.” What concerned her, though, was not the snapshot but the movie. With global metal prices so high, she told me, “We should be flying. With such a privileged position, you would expect more growth.” In 2010, for example, when global metal prices were lower than they are now, the growth rate of the Peruvian economy was more than eight per cent. By comparison, the current growth looks anemic.

What’s more, the windfall from high metal prices has not been used to make any meaningful investments in health care, education, or infrastructure. Even when money has been allocated, there has been no capacity to manage the execution: according to a World Bank study, nearly half of the country’s publicly financed projects begun since 2012 are unfinished. “So you have a lot of projects with an approved budget—to expand a highway or build a health center or a school. Someone wins the contract, gets the down payment, moves a few stones, then takes the money and disappears,” Trivelli said. “If you spend money to build a school, but you leave it half done, then, no, you didn’t improve anything.” There’s no question that this unfortunate cocktail of corruption, inefficiency, and simple incompetence is holding the country back. This year, owing to a mixup in the congressional budget, one of the government’s most important scholarships was left severely underfunded, depriving thousands of Peru’s neediest high-school graduates of the opportunity to continue their studies at local universities. Another program, known as Beca Bicentenario, which helps Peru’s top-performing students study abroad, was simply suspended.

Given this context, perhaps it’s not surprising that, even as foreign currency accumulates in the Central Bank, none of the short-lived governments of the past several years has been able to bring poverty back down to pre-pandemic levels, something that nearly every other country in the region has managed. To make matters worse, the weak or nonexistent executive branch—in the past decade, Peru has had eighteen ministers of economy and finance and twenty-nine ministers of the interior—has ceded its budgeting authority to a Congress that represents assorted local mafias (illegal logging, illegal mining, and traffickers of all sorts), hardly the kind of interest groups that are keen on fiscal responsibility or long-term planning. Unfortunately, Trivelli told me, “we’re spending every last cent, and spending it really badly.” The question, then, isn’t why the Peruvian economy is doing so well but what investments haven’t been made because no one is around long enough to see any particular project through.

Trivelli is a member of Peru’s Fiscal Council, a government entity whose mission is to advise Congress and the executive branch on matters of economic and fiscal policy. Its advice is nonbinding, but last month the Council took the unusual step of publicly sounding the alarm regarding newly mandated permanent spending obligations on improved pensions for retired police and military. These are the sorts of commitments that the treasury may not be able to meet, should gold prices drop or foreign investment dry up. The Council’s report identified sixty-three laws passed in the last five years that had created permanent new obligations for the state, including five whose combined impact was equivalent to more than nine per cent of the country’s G.D.P.

The consequences of this lack of planning may come all too soon. Forecasters are predicting a particularly powerful El Niño next year. The last Super El Niño, in 1997 and 1998, caused flooding and damages that cost Peru’s infrastructure about $3.5 billion. A nation that, for all intents and purposes, has had no one at the wheel for the better part of a decade is not going to be prepared to face similar disasters.

If the economic outlook isn’t as rosy as the indicators suggest, the political chaos may actually be worse than it appears. The political scientist Alberto Vergara explained that so much churn and instability have, perhaps inevitably, resulted in the disillusionment of an entire generation. When we spoke, Vergara shared a telling anecdote: one day, he asked the students in his class at Universidad del Pacífico, in Lima, what had happened in politics that morning. None of them knew. The answer, at least on the surface, was seismic: in the midst of a political crisis, the President had ordered a reshuffling of her Cabinet and sworn in four new ministers in a single day. In another era, Vergara told me, this would have been momentous, and he would, reasonably, have expected students of political science to be aware of it—but not today, not anymore. Perhaps his students were unimpressed, or unmotivated, or perhaps they had simply arrived at an intuitive understanding of the irrelevance of it all. “In Peru, caring about politics is not rational,” he said.

That may be the most salient cultural message of so much political instability. If it doesn’t matter who the President is, it certainly doesn’t matter who is in the Cabinet. After all, it won’t be long before the cast changes yet again. The goal of all this havoc is not to destroy democracy, according to Vergara—though that might be a welcome side effect, to some—but to torpedo the rule of law and thereby protect illicit financial gains. If Congress is ignoring the constitutionally required fiscal guardrails, as Trivelli and the Fiscal Council argue, it’s also changing laws to protect its own members, more than half of whom are being investigated for corruption. In the past few years, Congress has passed laws exempting specific businesses from paying a total of nearly eight billion dollars a year in taxes, created a statute of limitations on war crimes, taken the task of investigations away from the Attorney General, ignoring the concerns of prosecutors, and removed members of the Board of Justice who were looking into an influence-peddling scheme. Of course, all of this convenient acquiescence will sound familiar in the United States, where our own Congress and Department of Justice have been nothing if not servile to a brazenly corrupt executive. In any case, the result, in Peru as in the U.S., is the same: a kind of institutionalized lawlessness that can be very lucrative for those who weren’t much interested in the law to begin with.

Voting is mandatory in Peru, but more than six million Peruvians skipped the first round of this election, in April. Another three million went to the polls but left their ballots blank or made them unreadable, in protest. Taken together, the blank or spoiled ballots would have comfortably won the April vote, and the blank votes alone would have beaten thirty-four of the thirty-five candidates. The runoff, scheduled for Sunday, June 7th, pits Keiko Fujimori, a daughter of the former President (with seventeen per cent of the vote), against the congressman and former Minister of Trade and Tourism Roberto Sánchez (twelve per cent), whose late surge in the polls allowed him to squeak into the runoff ahead of Lima’s right-wing mayor. Both candidates, it should be mentioned, have been dogged by accusations of corruption, which they deny. Fujimori was sentenced to pretrial detention in October, 2018, and released two years later. This campaign is her fourth attempt to win the Presidency, a position that she has aspired to since her parents’ marriage collapsed, in an explosive public feud when she was a teen-ager, and she was named First Lady. Keiko, as she is known in Peru, is the heir and protector of her father’s political legacy—one that includes mass killings, the forced sterilization of thousands of Indigenous women, and a bribery scheme so vast that it ensnared virtually all of Lima’s political and media élites before finally ending his Presidency. Though Keiko has served only one term in Congress, she has spent the past two decades as a savvy, often unscrupulous political operator, the leader of a powerful congressional contingent that has been behind much of the disorder of the last decade. Meanwhile, Sánchez served in the Cabinet of the former President Pedro Castillo, who was arrested four years ago after a plot to dissolve Congress failed. Late in the campaign, Sánchez took to wearing Castillo’s signature sombrero, and seemed untroubled by his former boss’s attempted coup d’état. His first-round success was built on Castillo’s coalition, in fact, and he won most of his votes from outside Lima, sparking predictably outraged and racist responses from the city’s élites. (The capital’s mayor, the arch-conservative Rafael López Aliaga, known to all as Porky, missed the runoff by just twenty-one thousand votes, and refused to accept the results.) Sánchez and his party have promised to push for a new constitution and to redistribute wealth, though he has backed off from an earlier threat to remove the long-serving head of the Central Bank, Julio Velarde. Such a move would undoubtedly shock global investors, who have come to see Velarde as the adult in a dismayingly chaotic room, a stabilizing presence amid the seemingly endless political disruptions of the last decade.

Together, Sánchez and Fujimori won less than a third of the tallied vote. No matter who wins in the runoff, it’s unlikely that the new President of Peru will have a mandate, and Congress will continue to hold much of the power that it has wielded throughout the convulsions of the past decade. Day to day, ordinary Peruvians in the coastal cities and in the interior are dealing with escalating crime, fear of impending natural disasters, and corruption and incompetence at every level of government. Whether an actual functioning executive could do much to confront these crises is hard to say, and it’s reasonable to wonder how long the new President will last in the role, anyway. Whoever wins, perhaps the most important accomplishment that the next Peruvian head of state could manage would be simply to see out a five-year term. Even that, unfortunately, may be too much to ask. ♦